Crime Seen (11 page)

Michael Dunahee, age 4

Michael age-enhanced to 26

*
Steve requests that her name be kept private.

MIND HUNTING

“To understand the artist you must look at the artwork … to understand the criminal you must look at and study the crime itself.”

—John Douglas

FROM MY DAY-TO-DAY INTERACTIONS
in the BSU I could see the pressure that the agents were under working all these high-profile and stressful cases. They were assigned a huge caseload and were continually travelling around the country and internationally to do on-site consultations. Many were also teaching Academy courses, as well as presenting at various FBI “field schools,” seminars and conferences, that again required them to be away from their office caseloads.

A number of BSU members were off on sick leave when I first arrived. Others had been afflicted in the past with serious illnesses undoubtedly related to the stress of working in such an environment. Even the recently promoted BSU chief, John Edward Douglas, had in the past contracted such an illness—and it almost cost him his life.

When I first met John, I thought he epitomized what an FBI agent would look like. He was tall, fit, good-looking and well-dressed, down to the monogrammed “JED” shirt cuffs. I had heard rumours about his large ego and that he even joked about it. But the first day John spoke to my class he was all business and cautioned us about the mental and physical toll that the work could take. We knew he spoke to us from experience.

In December 1983, at thirty-eight years of age, John suffered a near-fatal brain hemorrhage from viral encephalitis. He was working on numerous high-profile serial murder cases, travelling to different parts of the US and Canada to do on-site consultations. He was also trying to keep up with a full schedule of speaking engagements. He acknowledged that he was extremely fatigued, working too much, drinking too much, having trouble sleeping, and overall under tremendous stress. He was in Seattle, Washington, when he started to feel physically ill and thought he was getting the flu. Two colleagues later found him collapsed in his hotel room and called for an ambulance. John was in critical condition when he arrived at the hospital and slipped into a coma. A week later he came out of the coma with stroke-like physical impairments, including partial paralysis. It took him five months of gruelling rehabilitation therapy before he achieved a full recovery. Unfortunately, when he returned to work John found out that nothing much had changed in relation to the workload assigned to BSU staff. He told us that he hoped that our class, especially those of us from outside the US, would return to our departments and help with the BSU workload in the future.

I was acquainted with most of the officers that John had worked with in Canada and he had a reputation for seeming to put aside whatever he was working on with an “if you need me, I’ll be there” attitude. He and other unit members had been travelling to Toronto to provide their crime-analysis services for almost a decade. The head of the city’s specialized investigative squads was a National Academy graduate and familiar with the BSU’s services. All were high-profile cases: the murder of a Welsh nanny, Christine Prince, who was abducted while walking home after an evening out with friends (a case that remains unsolved); a re-investigation of the deaths of children being treated on the cardiac ward at the Hospital for Sick Children (no longer classified as homicides); the murder of University of Toronto student Deliana Heng (solved through DNA match and conviction of Tien Poh Shu); the murder of eleven-year-old Alison Parrott (solved with DNA match and conviction of Francis Carl Roy): and a series of seven unsolved sexual assaults in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough.

When John found out I was working in Toronto, he was eager to talk about one case in particular that he had been involved in. In 1984 Toronto officers introduced John to the Durham Regional Police detectives investigating the abduction and murder of nine-year-old Christine Jessop in Queensville, about an hour north of Toronto. John went with investigators to the area where the young girl lived and was last seen, as well as the location where her body was discovered three months after she went missing. The next morning he provided the officers with a tape-recorded “unknown offender profile.” After he had done that, John was told that Christine’s twenty-three-year-old neighbour, Guy Paul Morin, was a suspect. John listened to a taped interview of him and agreed with the investigators that he seemed to be a good suspect. Some of the characteristics and traits that John believed the killer would possess matched the neighbour, others did not. They discussed investigative strategies, including releasing parts of his profile to the media and observing how this neighbour reacted before they interviewed him again.

I was already familiar with this case because there was so much media attention given not only to Christine’s murder, but also because Morin had since been arrested, charged and then acquitted at his 1986 trial. John was adamant in standing behind his original unknown offender profile of the still-unidentified killer.

(The case didn’t end there. It was appealed and retried twice, finally ending in Morin being acquitted of Christine’s murder, released from his life imprisonment sentence and receiving a $1.25 million settlement. A later public inquiry provided 119 recommendations, three of which related to the use of criminal profiling services by police, all of which I agreed with and supported: that police be aware of the limitations of profiling; that profiles must not be modified by police after the fact and inappropriately disseminated to the public; and that information provided to profilers should be in writing.)

After three decades Christine’s murder remains unresolved.

John’s unit occasionally shared some of the violent and graphic details of the cases brought to them by investigators with visiting authors and others in the media. Some were even allowed to sit in on training sessions given by members of the BSU at the FBI Academy. One of the first was bestselling author Thomas Harris, whose book,
The Silence of the Lambs
, featured a dramatized depiction of the work done in the unit. The movie version, partly filmed at the FBI Academy, was released in January 1991 while I was attending my training. It was a box office hit that brought international interest to the real-life work being done in the BSU.

The movie was not a particularly accurate portrayal of the real work done by FBI profilers—for instance, selecting a rookie agent to assist in the investigation of a serial killer would just never happen. However the Academy phones rang for weeks after the movie’s release as thousands of young people called to get information on how to become an FBI profiler. Distractions were intense in the unit as a multitude of media, such as Lesley Stahl’s
60 Minutes
TV crew, were given access to interview John and other agent profilers, as well as film inside the unit. At first it was all quite exciting for me as a visiting police fellow, but it was brought to an end when it became too disruptive to the office.

On July 25, 1991, my training assignment with the FBI was officially over when the police fellows’ graduation ceremony and banquet was held at the Quantico Marine Base officers’ mess. John and most of the members in the unit involved in our training attended. It was a proud time for all of us, and especially moving to have our families there with us. OPP commissioner Tom O’Grady flew in earlier in the day to attend the event. As a former National Academy graduate, he had used his contacts in the FBI to obtain the OPP’s police fellowship position. We got sad news just before dinner when the commissioner received word that forty-one-year-old OPP sergeant Thomas Cooper had just been shot and killed while responding to a firearms complaint. This was announced to the banquet attendees and a moment of silence followed. The commissioner and I were very touched by this expression of respect and solidarity.

Early the next morning, I drove the commissioner back to the airport as he was anxious to get home to Ontario to meet with the slain officer’s family. I returned to the Academy to finish packing, say my goodbyes and drive with Bob and my family in a convoy back to Canada. I was anxious to get my personal life off hold and particularly wanted to get home to plan my wedding as Bob had proposed on a weekend that he’d visited me at Quantico. It had taken me thirty-five years to find the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with and I wanted to get living it.

The BSU had its office politics and its various egos, sometimes at odds with one another, but I can’t say that I ever worked in a high-stakes office environment that was exempt from that. I didn’t care who interviewed which infamous serial killer, who coined which profiling term, who was working on the most high-profile case, or even who in the office the character Jack Crawford in
The Silence of the Lambs
movie was fashioned after. I did my best to stay out of the politics while I was there and soak up as much as I possibly could.

There is a Japanese proverb that goes something like, “Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an ass.” I was leaving Quantico feeling like I was riding a thoroughbred racehorse. I had been provided massive amounts of specialized knowledge but that was only half of it. I had just spent the last ten months of my life working with these agents and my fellowship colleagues on unsolved major criminal investigations from around the world. The FBI had given me the opportunity to be involved in the investigation of crimes that had more peculiar, deviant, cruel and bizarre behaviours than I ever could have imagined a human being would be capable of. The cases didn’t always get solved, but every analysis gave investigators, and me, a new perspective, insight and confidence in our abilities.

I will always be grateful to Roger Depue for creating this educational opportunity for police officers and to John Douglas and his agents for the knowledge and wisdom they shared with me when I attended their training program. As it turned out, mine was the last class the FBI hosted, citing budget cutbacks as the reason. But the academic education and practical experience that I was given was second to none that I received over the rest of my thirty-three-year policing career. And there was a lasting bonus: it yielded me lifelong friendships with my fellow trainees and many of the FBI agents and others that I met at the Academy. When I graduated the program, I had the wherewithal to return to Canada and hang out my shingle as a criminal profiler in a time when few had even heard of criminal profiling. I was exhilarated and admittedly a bit nervous. But I knew that all of my FBI mentors and colleagues were only a phone call away. Also, recent graduate Ron MacKay and I had been in touch with one another throughout my course and he assured me that since he was living in Ottawa he was only a few hours’ drive away whenever I wanted his help.

OPEN FOR BUSINESS

“Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.”

—Peter T. McIntyre

WHEN I GOT BACK FROM QUANTICO
, I was transferred to work at Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB) located on the third floor of OPP headquarters in downtown Toronto. The detective inspectors (DIs) assigned to the elite branch were the best-of-the-best detectives, responsible for investigating all major crimes such as homicides, and also assisted in extraditions, coroner’s inquests, judicial inquiries and any other of our serious criminal investigations or those of other police services who requested their help.

Rather than the bullpen office setting I’d always worked in before, everyone here had their own offices. As a corporal I was lower in rank than the dozen or so DIs but was given a large corner office since the guys were usually on the road working their cases and didn’t use theirs much. Once again I was working out of a vacant boardroom, but it was nice not to have to share it with six other people. Unfortunately fresh air wasn’t abundant in this workspace either because if I’d even been able to get my window open, I’d have been close enough to feel the wind of six lanes of traffic whizzing by on the Gardiner Expressway, which runs across the south end of the city. But for the first time I had my own office, which allowed me to hang my FBI graduation certificate and signed De Niro photograph on a “me” wall. It was all I had to potentially impress my co-workers compared to the multitude of certificates and “attaboy” plaques hanging in their offices.